1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of information processing systems and, more particularly, to backup and restore of data objects from an object database.
2. Description of the Related Art
Modern computer networks include so-called “directory services,” which are software applications (or sets of applications) for storing and organizing information about users, services and resources. A directory service also allows network administrators to manage users' access to resources. Common directory services include NIS (Sun Microsystems, Inc.), eDirectory (Novell, Inc.), Fedora Directory Server (Red Hat, Inc.), Active Directory and NTDS (Microsoft Corp.), Open Directory (Apple Computer, Inc.), ApacheDS (Apache Software Foundation), OID (Oracle Corp.), and also the open-source software OpenLDAP. The X.500 series developed by ITU-T is a series of computer networking standards covering electronic directory services.
A given directory service is associated with a “directory repository,” which is the database that stores the information that is managed by the directory service. For example, a directory repository may include one or more “namespaces” that include a hierarchy of data (e.g., data objects). The directory service thus acts as an interface that can authenticate access to the system resources that manage data in the directory repository. For example, a directory service allows the directory repository to be searched on the many different attributes or object identifiers that can be associated with objects within the repository.
A backup of a directory repository associated with a directory service is generally “monolithic”—that is, the entire repository is replicated. The corresponding restore operation for a directory repository is often monolithic as well. Monolithic restore operations are often complex, inefficient, and time-consuming.